Reconciliation: Incorrect Starting Balance

[Tommy Trussell]

On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 7:50 AM, David <dgpickett at aol.com> wrote:

> So, an imbalance in the future reconciled can make a past reconcile go
> nuts.  A workaround is to add a future fake reconciled to adjust the early
> start to zero for the past date you are reconciling.  Once there are no
> future reconciled it should have to be set to zero and is not needed.
>  Probably a lot of this problem came from future reconciled items.
>

It sounds like you are reconciling to future imaginary bank statements and
have divined that there will be errors in those future statements. Surely
this isn't ACTUALLY what you are trying to do?

The whole purpose -- indeed the entire MEANING of the word "reconcile" in
this instance -- is to compare your books with someone else's and make them
agree. You might want to look over the GnuCash documentation again:
http://gnucash.org/docs/v2.4/C/gnucash-guide/txns-reconcile1.html



>  If reconcile only considered dates <= the reconcile date for the starting
> balance, a past reconcile redo would work more as expected.  Of course, if
> the are reconciled items you need to uncheck to reconcile an old statement,
> you will need to unreconcile them individually, first.
>
> Some sort of administrative reset all to unreconciled would mean that you
> could reconcile the whole account to the last statement.  Of course, you
> would need to check a lot of transactions, so that is not easy, either.
>
>
You can ALWAYS reconcile an account to the last statement, if you wish. If
you look only at the bank's most recent statement, however, then you could
"lose" a few transactions that did not clear the bank before that
statement. In many cases this will work fine, and might be a good way to
"catch up" when reconciling an existing account, being mindful that you
might inadvertently mark some transactions as reconciled when they are not.

When I have started tracking an existing checking account to GnuCash, I
have picked a date in the past (usually more than one year ago) and
reconciled all the bank statements from the arbitrary past date to the most
recent statement. That first oldest statement may "miss" some non-cleared
transactions but after a year (in my state) older checks are legally void,
so if they haven't cleared in that past year I can legally ignore them.

(Practically speaking, if my books show a very old outstanding un-cleared
check to someone, I would probably tell them before taking it off my books.)

Reconciling credit card accounts are similar, but I have never seen old
outstanding credit card transactions more than a month old, so I might feel
comfortable reconciling an account to the most recent two statements.


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